


Pillars

by ambyr



Category: Bel Dame Apocrypha - Kameron Hurley
Genre: Drabbles, Gen, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-11
Updated: 2014-01-11
Packaged: 2018-01-08 07:17:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1129862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambyr/pseuds/ambyr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five drabbles. Five acts. Five people trying (or failing) to move on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pillars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cordialcount](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordialcount/gifts).



"There is no God but God." Nyx had that ground into her head in the compounds, in school, in training. She remembers hundreds of recruits chanting it in unison. "There is no God but God," so go kill those harem-hoarding mullah-worshippers who set themselves as intermediaries between their wives and the divine.

She almost believed it, then.

Out on the border, with no company but sand and brush and the melted remains of comrades turned to bloody puddles by some sage-scented burst, she learns a different mantra. There is no God, no God at all. Only Nyx. Only ever herself.

* * *

"Kill all of them," Elahyiah had told her husband, and she knew they were not idle words. 

Oh, he was kind, her husband, was gentle with her for her failings. But she had seen what lay in the box locked on her wedding day, for all that she vowed to forget it when he vowed to leave it shut. Rhys might wrap himself in the names of God, but she knew what violence lay beneath that shroud.

“Kill them,” she said to Rhys, to God, and never doubted her prayer would be answered.

It was. She is still empty inside.

* * *

At sunrise, Suha checks into a run-down hotel, sets the venom phial in one corner of the room, sits in the other. 

Already, the worms in her blood writhe with hunger. She clenches her fists and recites the names of God. Repeats them, over and over, as the worms thrash inside her, die inside her, slither out mixed with pus and shit.

By sunset, the names are much curse as praise. Her hands shake, drop the phial twice, fumble with the needle. She falls asleep in her own bloody waste, the remaining worms silenced.

Tomorrow, she'll begin her fast again.

* * *

Anneke knows she should stay on the coast. She’s got a good life there: a home, more kids than she can point fingers at. Sometimes hours pass without her getting lost in the sniper’s thousand-yard stare.

She tells Nyx that’s what draws her back, every time Nyx calls: the need to look further, the itch to sight on something that might shoot back. 

Truth is, she goes because she knows Nyx can’t fucking look after herself. But if she said that, Nyx and her pride would stop calling.

Anneke doesn’t mind a little charity if it keeps her boss alive.

* * *

Rakhshan Arjoomand had never set foot outside a city. He knew the dangers of the war when he planned this pilgrimage: the bursts, the plagues, the mines.

He had not understood the dangers of the desert. The sands stretch endlessly between Chenja and Nasheen, knife-edged orange mounds that burn his soles and tear through his robe with each gust of wind. His water is long gone. Each step leaves him hacking, though he has dodged every burst thus far.

 _God will see me through_ , Rhys thinks, because nothing else will keep him moving. The sky burns purple. He stumbles on.


End file.
